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Re: [compost_tea] Re: Soak in a Bucket CT



Kirk, I think you need to hit the old rewind button.  If I understand 
your continuing concern, it's that you don't want manure teas to be 
unfairly maligned, misunderstood and treated differently -- and 
finally perhaps even prohibited by regulation -- than compost tea and 
that the best way to do that is to pretend that manure tea is really 
just another form -- in fact the great granddaddy of  -- what people 
have recently come to call "compost" tea.  No it isn't.  Neither is 
Alaska Humus tea. Neither is worm casting tea.

Compost is compost.  Manure is manure. Humus is humus. Worm castings 
are worm castings.  As we all know, the common trait and appeal 
amongst them for us is that they each contain a jillion/squillion 
microbes across many species and have the potential to restore or 
enhance the soil (and foliar) foodweb applied either directly as soil 
amendments or as teas.  Where they part ways is in their respective 
potentials to contain chemical residues and/or harbor, propagate and 
transmit pathogens.  The fact that this is inconvenient or 
unfortunate doesn't change things. In fact that very distinction is 
basically the reason we started our company. Why?  Because not only 
do we know what's in our humus, we know what's not in it. Unlike 
manure, for instance, Alaska Humus didn't pass through a colon on its 
way to becoming Alaska Humus. It became humus over thousands of years 
of in-the-ground decomposition by countless beneficial microbes.  As 
a consequence, there's no prospect that it even harbors, say, E.coli 
or Weed-B-Gone or antibiotics to begin with.  Nor was it ever 
anearobic.  Not so with manure. And even though that puts advocates 
like you in the position of constantly having to prove a negative, 
the difference is nevertheless real, fundamental and important.  
Which is not at all the same as saying it is fatal to the prospects 
for regulatory approval of manure tea or that I have a bias against 
manure tea or anybody's use of it.  I don't.  But regulators may 
because the contrast is still clear and unavoidable.  So I don't 
think trying to advocate and elevate the notion that we should all 
just agree that steeped manure tea is in every way indistinguishable 
from -- and therefore as consistently beneficial and benign as -- 
aggressively aerated, nutrient-enriched compost or humus tea is 
either realistic or useful.

Wayne Lewis, Alaska Humus Company, Anchorage


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